NPS runs 0–10, CSAT 1–5, CES 1–7: our earlier post had two of three scales wrong

01Three metrics, three scales, three different questions

The Net Promoter Score is the one with a single owner. Bain’s Net Promoter System asks “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” on a zero-to-ten scale, calls 9s and 10s promoters, 7s and 8s passives and 0 to 6 detractors, and defines the score as the share of promoters minus the share of detractors.¹ Passives count in the denominator and nowhere else, so the score runs from minus 100 to plus 100 and a customer who moves from 8 to 9 changes it while one who moves from 2 to 6 does not.

The arithmetic is worth doing once. Take 100 answers: 50 promoters, 30 passives, 20 detractors. The score is 50 minus 20, or plus 30. Turn ten passives into promoters and it reads plus 40. Turn ten detractors into passives and it also reads plus 40. Lift ten detractors from 2 to 6, a large improvement in how those customers feel, and it still reads plus 30. NPS is built to track the loyal and the hostile, not the middle, which is why it suits a board slide and a twice-yearly read better than a weekly support target.

Customer satisfaction has no owner, which is why it travels on different scales. The common form, as Qualtrics describes it, asks how satisfied the customer was on a 1-to-5 scale with 3 as neutral, and reports the share who answered 4 or 5.² Customer effort comes out of a July–August 2010 Harvard Business Review article titled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”.⁷ HubSpot, which ships all three surveys in its help desk, runs effort on “a seven-point scale ranging from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree” and groups answers into 1 to 3 difficult, 4 to 5 neutral and 6 to 7 easy.^{3 8}

02A survey tool in India costs ₹0 to ₹4,999 a month

Of the three tools the 2023 post named, SurveyMonkey is the one that prints rupee prices to an Indian visitor. Its individual plans run from a free Basic plan to Standard at ₹899 a month billed monthly, Advantage at ₹1,999 a month billed as ₹23,988 a year, and Premier at ₹4,999 a month billed as ₹59,988 a year. Team plans need at least three users and are not priced on the same page.⁴

The plan names hide the real decision. Every NPS, CSAT or CES survey is a form with one scored question and a free-text follow-up, and all four plans can carry that. What the money buys is volume, which is the next section.

03The response allowance is the real price

SurveyMonkey charges ₹5 for every response beyond a paid plan’s allowance.⁴ Divide each plan’s price by the responses it includes and the overage is the expensive line by a wide margin.

The practical rule follows. Estimate responses, not users: a quarterly NPS sent to the whole base and a CSAT question after every closed ticket generate very different volumes. Size the plan to the year’s responses with headroom, because the overage rate punishes the under-buyer more than the annual commitment punishes the over-buyer.

How many responses are enough is a statistics question, not a vendor one. A CSAT of 80% from 100 answers carries a margin of about 8 points either way at 95% confidence; from 400 answers, about 4; from 1,600, about 2. A team that wants to see a 3-point month-on-month change in CSAT needs roughly 1,400 answers a month, more than Standard’s 1,000-a-month allowance, and a team that reports CSAT by agent needs that volume per agent before the ranking means anything. NPS is noisier still, because it is the difference of two shares, so a quarterly NPS from a few hundred customers should be read as a range, not a number.

04Listening and enterprise CX are bought on other units

The other two tools in the 2023 list are different purchases. Sprout Social, named for social listening, prices per seat: Standard at US$199, Professional at US$299 and Advanced at US$399 a seat a month on annual billing, with listening sold as a paid add-on on every plan and its price behind a demo request.⁵ Qualtrics prints no prices; every customer-experience tier carries a “Request Pricing” button, and the metric is described as “based on interactions”.⁶

The third route is the one most Indian teams already own. HubSpot’s Service Hub carries CSAT, NPS and CES surveys tied to the CRM record, but feedback surveys need a Professional or Enterprise seat.^{3 8} Freshdesk lists CSAT analytics among its help-desk features.⁹ A survey inside the help desk knows which ticket, agent and customer an answer belongs to, which is what makes a low score actionable.